I wrote this for an English class (Science Fiction) at PSU. I thought it was enough of a psudeo-intellectual piece to go on DA. Essays can be art too.


I don't know how many people are SciFi nerds like me but there's something strangely precident about the forshadowings you can find in novels of this genre.

The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard arises interesting questions about where the psychosis of the human mind is alluding. The problem in society today is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued this life--not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic postures we assume. The real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere in what we might term 'the death affect.' Consider all our most real and tender pleasures--in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceputalization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.

In modern society, Science and pornography are becoming interchangable. Science is merely a perversion and prostitution of a good in high demand. Both reveal the same things normally kept hidden. Selling themselves for the bereavement of knowledge and satisfaction and fame. Consider the way you're touched in the doctors office; the doctor touches you in only ways a lover would touch you, except unerotically. They use the same parts, and often times the same acts (and you're going to take my temperature where?) to the point that there is no clear distinction between the two.

To expand on the ideas forementioned, when you break down the interaction that used to take place between two bodies, and replace it with images (ie. pornography) you remove the feelings experianced between the bodies. There are no insides to explore, only surfaces. You now have a body viewing an image, with no sensual reaction. Each image is a substitution of a more luxurious good, the body, which means the more you replace bodies with images the more you lose the feelings associated with the act of sex. The more you lose feelings, the more shocking and/or violent the image needs to be to arouse the same sensual feelings manipulated from body to body interaction. Once life goes to representation, all we are left with are aliented conceptualizations. Ya know, just something to think about...